The Point of Tipping (was "Cheap Bastards")

May 25, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

At Marginal Revolution, a blog that seems to be run mostly by economists, a post about tipping
has been provoking much response. Tyler Cowen, the original poster, got right to the central question.

The best way to understand tipping is to go to a restaurant you will never patronize again. Once your meal is over, when she is not looking, leave your tip not on your table but rather on another table she served. That way she still gets her money and you have in no way ripped her off.

That is psychologically tough to do.

We will never come back to the restaurant; we are never going to see this waiter or waitress again. Why should we care what they think of us?

From purely economic perspective, tipping is not rational, and it’s interesting to read the responses of hardline economists twisting themselves in knots to explain how, ultimately, tipping really is economically rational.

But the simpler explanation is that we are social beings, not merely economic maximizers. If you want to understand tipping, you’re better off reading Erving Goffman and not the standard Econ 101 text. We do care what others think, even anonymous strangers in public settings. Even when there are no real consequences, we follow the norms of self-presentation.

The payoff is not to our pockets but to our self-concept. You don’t want the waitress to think you’re a cheap bastard because you yourself don’t want to think that you’re a cheap bastard. At least one commenter at Marginal Revolution tells of deliberately not leaving a tip, but he feels obligated to give a long account so that we won’t think that this cheap bastard is a cheap bastard.

I don’t know if the research has been done, but what do you think would happen if you asked people to rate themselves as tippers — below average, average, above average? How many would say that they were below average tippers? People, even economists,
want to be able to think of themselves as generous.

A couple of years ago I was talking with a student, a slightly older (late 20s) woman who had at some point in her career worked as a waitress, and somehow the conversation got around to tipping. “I always leave a good tip,” she said, “on a $12 check, I might leave a $5 tip.” And she was by no means wealthy. Her income was certainly far less than mine. I was an 18-20% tipper —average, right? But suddenly I felt like a cheap bastard.

What’s an extra dollar or two on a $10 lunch tab or cab fare — what would you do with that money anyway. And it turns you from an average 20% tipper to a generous 30% or 40% tipper.

Mary Douglas

May 23, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

The New York Times had two featured obituaries yesterday, and both were for social scientists: Eugen Weber, a historian who wrote several books on France; and anthropologist Mary Douglas.

I know very little of Eugen Weber’s work. I remember reading his essay “Who Sang the Marseillaise?” many years ago, and how surprised I was to learn that the unification of France, politically and linguistically, was such a recent transformation. But that’s about it.

Mary Douglas was another matter altogether. I heard her speak once, when I was in graduate school. She was giving a brown-bag-lunch kind of talk, very informal. I had never even heard of her, but my girlfriend at the time, Melissa, had studied with Douglas as an undergrad in England, and she encouraged me to go with her.

There were maybe two dozen people in the seminar room. Douglas stood at one end of the long table; Melissa and I sat against the opposite wall. I remember absolutely nothing of what Douglas said. In fact, I remember only one thing. At some point, Melissa leaned close to me and whispered, “She’s my ego-ideal.” And even this small detail I remember only because she used the British pronunciation, “eggo,” so for a moment I wasn’t sure what she had said.

It was nearly a decade later that I finally read Purity and Danger, and it was a revelation. I was teaching the deviance course in those years, and I saw how Douglas’s ideas about the “unclean” could be easily applied to the “deviant.”

“Dirt is matter out of place,” she wrote. Places that are dirty, places that need to be cleaned, have things in them that do not belong. These things do not fit with our rules for how that place should be arranged. Dirt— literal dirt (soil, earth)— is not “dirty” when it’s in the flower pot. Similarly, animals that are “unclean” (to use the Biblical term) are those that do not fit our categories for “food.” We have a food taboo on dog meat, but dogs are not “unclean” as pets.

It was all about boundaries. A culture must construct categories, cognitive boundaries for perceiving the world and giving it meaning. Obviously, things which fall on the wrong side of the boundary will be considered deviant. But no system of categories will be perfect; some things will not quite fit into any of the categories. These anomalies, as Douglas called them, would also be deviant. They challenge the boundaries not by attacking and crossing them, but by making them fuzzy, imprecise, and even inaccurate.

Douglas’s ideas about purity and categories provided the larger framework for other ideas I was interested in. Suddenly, these diverse pieces began to fit together — Kai Erikson’s ideas about deviance as a boundary-marker (Wayward Puritans), ideas from small-group sociology about boundary-awareness in groups and individuals (Philip Slater’s Microcosm), rites of passage and the taboo-power of people who are crossing boundaries, even ideas from Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

I was disappointed to find out many years later that Douglas was politically conservative and critical of the environmental movement. Nothing else of hers that I read had the same impact as Purity and Danger.

Melissa went back to London, married a political radical, and made documentary films, often with a feminist bent. As I read the obit for Douglas, I wonder how long she remained Melissa’s eggo-ideal.

Wolfowitz, Corruption, and Parking Tickets

May 22, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

Paul Wolfowitz has finally agreed to resign from presidency of the World Bank. The controversy, at least on the surface, was about corruption. In some countries that received Bank money, some officials used their position to siphon off funds for personal gain rather than playing by the rules. Wolfie had gone to the World Bank as the guy who would sweep out corruption. Then it turned out that Wolfie himself had used his position to secure favors (a job with a high salary) for his girlfriend, Shaha Riza.

Wolfowitz and his supporters, mostly American neoconservatives — the folks who gave us the wonderful war in Iraq— argued that he had done no wrong and that he had played by the rules and cleared the package of goodies for his girlfriend with others at the Bank.

The whole affair raises questions about corruption as an individual and cultural characteristic. I seem to recall studies that contradicted the notion of a single trait that we might call “honesty.” Children who cheated on a test in one situation (in class) were not necessarily the ones who cheated in another (a take-home exam). Obviously the situation, the degree of opportunity it provided for cheating, made a big difference in the rate of dishonesty.

But although situational forces are important, some people may be more prone to dishonesty. The same goes for countries. Researchers, notably at the World Bank, have developed measures of corruption, and some countries consistently rank high (Nigeria, Uzbekistan, Paraguay), while others rank low (Denmark, Singapore).

In low-corruption countries, officials follow the rules even when it might be more convenient and more profitable to break them. In high-corruption countries, officials use the rules for private gain. Usually this takes the form of bribery. If you don’t bribe the right people, they may delay your project with interminable bureaucratic rules. Does this spill over into a general willingness to ignore inconvenient laws?

Ray Fisman at Columbia University realized that the UN in New York provided a ready-made natural experiment. Maybe Fisman had noticed all those cars with Diplomat plates parked in No Standing zones or next to fire hydrants, even though the city reserves special parking zones for them where we ordinary mortals may not park. Why shouldn’t they park illegally? They can get away with it. If Fisman or I parked there, we’d get a hefty ticket ($115). But diplomats have immunity, and they don’t have to pay for parking violations. Still, many diplomats obey the parking signs.

Fisman wondered if there might be a pattern among countries that freely flouted parking rules. So he got the city’s data on parking violations— even if the city couldn’t collect a fine, it still kept records— and sure enough, there was a strong correlation between a country’s score on the corruption index and the number of parking violations its diplomats had run up.



This copy of the graph is not very clear, and even in the original those three-letter country codes may be hard to read or decipher. You can get the full data set and original graph here.

The “culture of corruption” may explain parking violations. But what about Wolfowitz? It’s not hard to explain why a bureaucrat in Chad or Kazakhstan might use his office to secure a cushy job for his girlfriend. That’s just the way things are done. But the US does not have a culture of corruption.

Perhaps it’s more our belief in “US exceptionalism.” One facet of this belief is the idea that the US has a special place in the world and that it has been chosen by God to lead the world and improve the world. Because we are so important and because our intentions are so pure, we need not follow the usual rules and restraints that govern other countries when we try to accomplish our mission. As the World Bank investigation concluded, “Mr. Wolfowitz saw himself as the outsider to whom the established rules and standards did not apply.”

And besides, we have the power to force our will on other countries. Or as Mr. Wolfowitz so diplomatically put it, “If they fuck with me or Shaha, I have enough on them to fuck them too.”

In my mind’s eye, I can see Wolfowitz parking his car next to a No Standing sign and thinking “What I’m doing is so beneficial to the world that I must park in the most convenient spot, regardless of what the sign says.”

What’s My Survey Result?

May 18, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston
The TV networks have announced their new shows and schedules. The descriptions would be easy to parody if they didn’t already sound like parodies themselves (“a unique, character-driven drama that explores the very different worlds of law and spirituality in a humorous and heartfelt way”).

So I will resist temptation and note merely the presence of a sociological reality show on CBS.

POWER OF 10 polls thousands of people across the U.S. asking them, well, just about everything - from “What percentage of married Americans said they were virgins the day they got married?” to “What percentage of American's believe they are smarter than the president?” Each week, contestants must decide if they have their finger on the pulse of the American majority and can accurately predict the results of these nationwide surveys.

The CBS reality crew is taking us from “Survivor” to survey. Maybe “Power of 10” will be useful in Methods courses. Or courses on American culture.

It sounds a lot like “Family Feud,” and maybe this is just another instance of television recycling its garbage. CBS is starting the show in the summer, a scheduling ploy that suggests they don’t have a lot of confidence in the show.

But then, the last game show to start in the summer was “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” and it became a huge hit — probably because the host, Regis Philbin, got his bachelor’s degree in sociology.